Computer and network systems such as personal computers, workstations, server systems, and cloud storage systems, typically include data storage elements for storing and retrieving data. These data storage elements can include data storage devices, such as hard disk drives, solid state storage devices, hybrid storage devices, tape storage devices, and other mass storage devices.
Magnetic storage drives, such as hard disk drives, can employ various magnetic storage technologies. One such storage technology includes data storage drives with shingled magnetic recording (SMR) technology to increase storage densities on associated storage media. SMR technology physically overlaps adjacent data tracks on a magnetic storage media, in contrast to a non-overlapping recording technology, such as parallel magnetic recording (PMR) or other non-overlapping recording techniques.
As computer systems and networks grow in numbers and capability, there is a need for more and more storage capacity. Cloud computing and large-scale data processing systems have further increased the need for digital data storage systems capable of transferring and holding immense amounts of data. Data centers can include a large quantity of data storage devices in various rack-mounted and high-density storage configurations. However, when data storage devices that employ SMR techniques attempt to service many random storage operations in short periods of time, such as writes and reads, slowdowns can occur due in part to the preference of SMR techniques for large bursts of sequential writes instead of random writes to random storage locations.